Trouble Brewing in the Garage

I have been a homeowner (and a car owner) long enough to recognize an epic battle when it is brewing. I have had a few. For example, we owned a '90 Plymouth Voyager whose engine would shut off while we were driving down the road. Then it wouldn't start again for anything between one and six hours. About half the time this shutting down was preceded by the engine overheating. Of course, it would shut off without overheating sometimes, and it would overheat without shutting off sometimes. We came to dread going through the mountains because it might overheat and if so it might shut down. Or it might make it over Mount Timpanogos only to die on the way to the store later that night. Yes, we took it to several mechanics. But somehow we could never seem to get it to a mechanic while it was still misbehaving. So over the course of 5 years or so we just replaced everything. Never did fix the problem. Eventually it died for good. Now, two cars later, my eye still twitches when I start driving uphill. And the Divine Ms. B still turns the AC off and the heater on, even in the middle of August, just to keep the engine cool

Of course, the maddening thing was the seemingly random nature of it. No one ever figured out why, or when, or how, or if, the stupid thing was going to shut down.

Now the garage light is starting.

We've lived for a long time with a balky shop light in the garage. It acted up when the weather got cold, because of course the framastat or the freemulator or whatever it is that gets the gases in the long florescent bulbs excited enough to start glowing wouldn't work if the temperature was too low. But then I finally broke down and bought a new shop light rated for cold weather, and hung it up. Now, the shop light has to plug in to a grounded three-prong power outlet, and of course the light switch controls a regular old single-bulb light socket. So we had used one of those screw-in adapters, screwed into another of those screw-in adapters, and a three-prong to two-prong adapter.


Voila! There was light!

Until there wasn't.

Of course, I took things apart and frowned at them, and reassembled them and tried it again. And there was light. Until there wasn't. So I took out the most suspicious looking adapter, since I only really needed one, and tried it again. And there was light. Until there wasn't. I eventually replaced all the parts with other parts we found in my toolbox. Each time it worked, for a while. So I frowned and tightened and wiggled things with reckless abandon. And, after various combinations of new and old adapters, we have finally arrived at the state where sometimes the light works, and sometimes it doesn't. I scratched my head and told the Divine Ms. B, "That'd be an electrical problem. Yup." And there we stand, until I make a trip to Lowe's and buy another adapter, one that hasn't had a chance to catch a bad attitude from the other spare hardware in my toolbox.

Results of the Procedure

Well, my friends were right. The preparation was by far the worst part. In fact, the part where they put the sleepy juice into my IV was really rather pleasant, at least the six seconds of it that I remember. And afterward, I got crushed ice in a Styrofoam cup. Beat that!

But the best part is, despite what many of you might think, there was NO STICK!

And I've got the picture to prove it:


So there.

An Attack of Modern Medicine

Tomorrow I begin preparations for a medical procedure. I am having this procedure on Monday morning, but preparations begin tomorrow. I am having this procedure for two reasons. The first is, my wife's friend's husband had some health problems, and so I had to go get a physical. (You married men will understand this.) The second is, when you get a physical and you are past the age of 50, your punishment is to go get this procedure. Even if your doctor himself admits, in front of your wife, that he has sort of been putting it off himself -- that's how much fun it is, this procedure -- you still have to go get it because apparently That's The Rules.

So anyway, preparations begin with nothing but clear liquids tomorrow, and then a couple of pills about noon, then drinking a lot of something that as near as I can tell turns into Scrubbing Bubbles. And from what I'm told, it tastes like it, too.

Friends and relations who have had this procedure already assure me that the day of preparation for it is by far the worst part. Considering the procedure itself bares a striking resemblance to what happens when people are abducted by aliens (probes, sharp things, etc.), that is really saying something. You can imagine what a comfort that has been to me.

So no matter how bad your Sunday is, you will still be having a better day than me. And a better morning Monday, too, although it may take hypnosis for me to really remember that part.

From Utah Valley Digestive Health Center, or Area 51?
You decide!

If a Tree Falls in a Barber Shop . . .

I realized yesterday that there are some questions I don't know the answer to. Oh, I'm not talking about the classic toughies like "What is truth?" and "If a tree falls in the forest. . . ." I mean questions I should know how to answer, in the not-exactly-rocket-science category. I encountered one such question yesterday, when the young lady swung my chair around to face the mirror and asked, "How would you like your hair done?"

You might as well ask a pig, "Do you think the paella needs a pinch more saffron?" Except the pig would have an unfair advantage in that he got the Yes/No question and I got Short Answer. If the pig just nodded his head, he would look more intelligent than I did, staring stupidly into the mirror, my mind searching in vain for an answer. A paradigmatic deer in the headlights moment for Steve.

The honest answer, of course, is "well, I want it to look kind of like it does now, only shorter.' But saying that, I fear, would insult the skill and intelligence of the young lady. She wants to hear something like "layer the left side, and I'd like filigree on the right side, and shave 'J-Lo' into the back, and can you weave some beads across the bald spot?" Now that's an order worthy of those two years of beauty school.



As it was, all I could come up with was, "well, make it shorter." She looked into the eyes of my reflection in the mirror, saw panic, and resorted to the "ask some questions" technique (Lesson 17, "Dealing with the Hopelessly Clueless Client"). "How much shorter?" She had me there. "About an inch?" she asked helpfully/hopefully. "Yeah, " I said, trying to portray the image of a devil-may-care man of the world, who had been places and seen things and could tell you that when the rhino is charging and you have to make the shot, nobody cares if your hair is three-quarters of an inch shorter or an inch and a half, and so an inch would be fine, because I had better things to do, like go home and clean my elephant gun.

The rest of our business was transacted pretty much in silence, until she asked, "Does that look short enough?" The truth was, it looked like it always looked after a haircut, which was blurry, because my glasses were in my pocket. "Looks great!" I said. "Do you want some product in it?" "Nah," I said, trying once again to project the idea that it isn't product in your hair that will save you in the jungle. She released me, I threw a $20 at her and bolted for the door.

People have complemented me on my haircut. I thank them graciously, and give them a smile that says, "It's all in letting the stylist know what you want. You've just got to be firm."

At Last! Corporate America Understands Me!

Warning to Church Ladies and Utah Republicans: This blog contains pictures of partially nekkid women. You might try http://seriouslysoblessed.blogspot.com instead.

I’m used to dealing with junk mail and “$-$-$-$AVE BIG!” offers. You know the type: “This coupon good for $300 off a New Lexus!” (Just what I was waiting for. I had the other $79,700 sitting in the bank, biding my time.) Living as I do with wives and daughters I’m also used to various free samples of pantyhose and aloe-intensive razors. I get a LOT of pink junk mail. I could wallpaper the house with JoAnn Fabric flyers. You get the idea.

So I wasn’t particularly thrown off my game when I saw the following piece of pink junk mail last week:

My major concern was finding out what kind of cosmetic or perfume was going to find its way into the bathroom menagerie as a result. So I opened it to find out. Attached was this little card.


Ah. Victoria's Secret. OK. I could live with that. What kind of damage could be done with $10 in Victoria's Secret? Like $300 off on a Lexus. So I announced to the assembled females, "Anybody want $10 off on some underwear?" Yeah, my wife agreed that someone could use that, and I shouldn't throw it away.

I examined the fine print more closely. "...any purchase during the month of your birthday." That would mean we'd have to wait until (straining the small part of my male brain that remembers birthday months) . . . uh, June (got that one easy, you got to remember the wife's birthday, after all) or April or July or August. Hmmm. I started to wonder how long it was good for. I looked on the back of the card for the finer fine print.

CARD VALID OCTOBER 1-31, 2008 it said on the back. Now THAT posed a conundrum. Why would they send out a card to a household of women that (with probability 0.70606674... -- no, really!) would not have a birthday in October? Sheesh. What morons.

So I cast my mind about to determine whether I knew a woman with an October birthday. As I was reeling my mind back in I started to shuffle through the other mail. An uncomfortable little feeling started to stretch in the back of my mind. Then it did some hopping about in place, then a few jumping jacks, a push-up or two, and then ran really fast up to the front of my mind.

MY birthday is in October. I slowly turned over the pink mailer. There it was:


It was me. I got to go spend $10 at Victoria's Secret. Me.

Well, that put a new perspective on the question, "What kind of damage could be done with $10 in Victoria's Secret?" I started to think about it. My wife gave me a funny look. I don't think she liked the gleam in my eye.

Red vs Blue

Utah and especially Utah County is a place that takes Red vs Blue very seriously. First, and perhaps most important, Red vs Blue symbolizes the rivalry between the University of Utah (Red) and Brigham Young University (Blue). I went to BYU, I work for BYU, I used to visit BYU as a child and play with the vending machines. It's not surprising that I have arrived at a fairly Blue state of being. (I have a niece and nephew who are Red, but seem otherwise normal.)





I am also Dodger Blue, as in the Los Angeles Dodgers. For the Red counterpart, you can pick Cincinnati or the Cardinals, I guess, but any true Dodger fan knows that the real issue, the one that really matters, is Blue vs Pinstripe (or perhaps Blue vs Orange--you know who you are, and no, we still haven't forgiven you). This is because the New York Yankees are (and I say this with complete objectivity) Evil Incarnate. (I have a son-in-law who is a Yankee fan but seems otherwise fairly normal.)



For me, the interesting question is Why? Why do I still get a small thrill when the Minnesota Vikings win? (Yes, they are Purple, but work with me here. I'll be back to Red and Blue in a minute.) My association with the great state of Minnesota consists of 1) a total of maybe 30 hours spent in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport waiting for connecting flights over the past 15 years, 2) driving across it in a rental truck and staying one night in a motel, and 3) listening to Garrison Keillor. But I still think the Vikings are cool, and have a better defense than most teams and are much, much better than the Dallas Cowboys, who are evil and smelly and a bunch of convicts anyway. I have absolutely no evidence for any of that, and I don’t even care enough to look up the facts and make a case. Why, then, do I believe it?


Well, because in junior high, my friend was a Viking fan. He was a Viking fan because he went to visit his cousins, who live in Minnesota, for a couple of weeks once. That's it. Because of that two week visit, I had to suffer the agony of watching the Vikings lose to the Cowboys on a last second Hail Mary from Roger Staubach to Drew Pearson in the NFC playoffs in 1975. I remember going on a long lonely walk in the cold and snow after the game. Not that that has anything to do with my feelings about the Cowboys, of course.



I am a Dodger fan probably because my brother is a Dodger fan, and he is a Dodger fan because our older sister is. She followed the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio in the 40's and 50's. He followed them from Los Angeles in the 60's, and I followed them in the 70's. I hate the San Francisco Giants because of the New York Giants and the 1951 Pennant game. I wasn't even alive then; I caught it from my siblings.

This is irrational under any possible definition of the word. Of course, I'm as good as anyone else at coming up with excellent reasons why my particular team is the best. If they don't play better, they have more heart. Or more class. Or at least they aren't dirty players. Or unlike others, they play for love of the game instead of money. Or they have more tradition. Or God loves them more. Or something. But all of it-- and here is my point -- all of it is justifying the choice I made after I made it.

Now, back to Red vs Blue, which has also come to symbolize the political spectrum, at least in the last couple of elections. Utah and especially Utah County takes this particular Red vs Blue very seriously as well. True, Utah County ranked only 27th on the list of the 100 most Republican counties in the 2000 presidential election, which I'm sure is a source of embarrassment to Utah County conservatives. But political opinions are pretty deeply held here, and they are definitely heavily slanted toward the Red side.

More and more, I am thinking that the foundations of all these Red vs Blue battles are pretty much grounded in the same kind of logic, that is, essentially none. I know we all like to think we stand on principles, and that while the other guys are knee-jerk-whatevers, we really see things clearly. But I’m not so sure. I think I may have been a Republican most of my life for the same reason I’ve been a Dodger fan and a Viking fan: my family and my friends.


In 1980, a social psychologist named Robert Zajonc (ZY-awns) published a paper called “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” He talked about his experiments that showed people don’t need to process things cognitively at all before making an affective (emotional) decision about them. In other words, we often judge what we like and don't like before we think about it at all. So I’m suggesting that maybe we decide about baseball teams, and political parties, based on what feels good (being part of the family, agreeing with friends, sensing which group is more fun to hang out with) and only then begin to justify the choice with our reason. And of course, over time, it becomes a habit to react positively to Red, and negatively to Blue, and to justify it more loudly and with more conviction.


Of course, we can and do change our opinions after studying things out, and we probably should do that a lot more than we do. But it only happens if we are willing to take seriously the possibility that just maybe, the other guys don’t suck as much as we thought.

So in that spirit, here’s to you, Yankee fans, Cowboy fans, and accursed Utes: Just for today, I’m gonna pretend you’re as smart as I am and maybe, just maybe, you have a valid point to make.

Monday morning, you’ll probably suck just as much as usual.

An Olive Branch

I need to hurry and apologize to all the Stephanie Meyer fans out there, because I really can't fight on two fronts and I'm planning to aggravate a lot more people in my next post. So, using the time-honored methods employed by a man when he knows he's defeated (especially by women), let me just say:

I'm sorry. I now recognize that Stephanie Meyer deserves a Nobel Prize for Literature, and Peace, and probably Medicine and Economics as well. I see nothing but genius in the literary device of having a teen-aged girl fall in love with a vampire, and I fully recognize that there is only nobility in the feelings women might have for Edward. I personally have witnessed readers of her books cured of leprosy. Go buy the books. Buy several, one for each room of the house.

As for me, I'm going to put reading Eclipse right on my list of things to do. After I lose weight and get in shape and get the family finances under control once and for all and read the Old Testament and clean out the garage and refinish all the furniture and run a marathon and schedule a colonoscopy and learn to play jazz harmonica, you won't be able to keep me away from it.